At the bottom of the new Yahoo compose screen there are two arrows pointing to the right ' >> '. Click them and you can compose the message in rich text as opposed to plain text. You can also create clickable link there manually.

If the links still don't appear for the recipient as 'live' links, ask them to ensure they have their email system set up to receive 'html' email and not just plain text.

popowich & seedy,
Appreciate your insights!
Before learning about the << & >> buttons, I confirmed with the recipients that the links I sent were not active.

Thanks to you both, I'm making progress. However:

On all Compose msgs, at the TOP RIGHT, I see the << button (Switch to Plain Text). Once OK’d, URL link became active. And then, at the TOP LEFT, it inserts >> button (Switch to Rich Text).

Selecting << converts it to an active BLUE link that I can see......but each subsequent new Compose msg brings back an un-active BLACK link & the >> button. So the URL is black & un-active, but when I send it to myself, I receive it as blue & active. Ditto when sending it to others.

Is it possible to make all URL's both permanently active & blue before I email it?

Another glitch:
Within the body of the msg, images appear as big blank boxes sometimes. Other times all the images appear horizontally at the top of the email.

I've used Yahoo mail for years & Win8 for 11 mos.....these quirks popped up in the last 3+mos. Is there incompatibility between Win8 & Yahoo that I can fix?

Is it possible to make all URL's both permanently active & blue before I email it?

Click to expand...

In my opinion the short answer is no.

There doesn't appear to be any way you can guarantee that every link you type into an email composed on Yahoo are always 'clickable', 'live' links/url's, a) because it appears to be the default of the new Yahoo Mail system not to automatically format links/url's rich text mode and b) because not all of your recipients will have their own email service set to receive emails in html format.

I've used Yahoo mail for years & Win8 for 11 mos.....these quirks popped up in the last 3+mos. Is there incompatibility between Win8 & Yahoo that I can fix?

Click to expand...

I'd be more inclined to believe that the problem seems to be with Windows 8 and if you use it, Internet Explorer, as opposed to Yahoo Mail itself as a lot of people recently are even having problems using their Hotmail / Outlook email on Internet Explorer. Microsoft don't seem to be doing themselves any favours.

As a side note, something else I've noticed is that Yahoo has become extremely slow in sending emails. Maybe it's time to switch?

Added:
Strange?!
I just composed 1 email in Rich Text and 1 in Plain Text on Yahoo web mail, both containing a link beginning with 'http://' and sent them to the same non-Yahoo address.
The email composed in Rich Text arrived with the link not-clickable - so not 'live'.
The email composed in Plain Text arrived with the link clickable - so 'live'.

So it seems:
1. The addition of 'http://' before any link (whether preceded by 'www.' or not) is important.
2. Composing a message in Plain Text and using the above (1.) has a higher chance of the link being automatically parsed by the Yahoo system as a 'live', clickable link - AS LONG AS THE RECIPIENT IS VIEWING THEIR EMAILS IN HTML